Playing with ReadyNAS 4312 Hardware - What's Compatible
Just wanted to share what I have found works and what doesn't work when you put it in a ReadyNAS 4312.
NICs
You can add additional SFP+ or ethernet ports with network cards. These additional ports show up as new interfaces in the "Network" menu on the web interface.
I have tested the following network cards:
10GTek Intel X520-DA2 Dual SFP+ 10 gigabit card:Works!(Plug and Play)
10GTek Intel X540-T2 Dual 10Gbe dual ethernet card:Works!(Plug and Play)
HP 10Gb Mellanox ConnectX-2 single SFP+ (you can get thesearound $20 or less online):Did not work!(not very good at driver compilation, someone more advanced at Linux than me might be able to come up with a guide for these)
NVMe Card(would be terrific if Netgear could implement some kind of SSD Cache Tiering feature...)
Samsung EVO 960 250GB directly plugged into the mPCIe slot on the motherboard:Did not work!
Samsung EVO 960 250GB plugged into an ASUS Hyper M.2 x4 Mini Card:Works!(Plug and Play, you can see and format it as /dev/nvme0n1)
SATA
If you open the chassis and remove the CPU vent hood, there are two working SATA ports on the motherboard. There are twoareasinside the chassis whereyou could mount a 2.5" drive, and there are two SATA power and two 4-pin molex power connectors inside. I would not recommend doing a factory reset and having drives plugged into those onboard ports. They will get added to the same array as the drives in the NAS's bays and they show up weird in the web interface. You cannot start the NAS without at least one drive in theregular 12 hotswap bays and that's true even if you put a internal driveon one of these 2 internal SATA ports.
RAM I haven't actuallytested putting any additional RAM personally. There's 2 slots occupied by Trascend-branded 8GB of Unregistered ECC DDR4-2133 RAM for a total of 16GB. The official specs sheet for the 4312 and 3312 say it can be upgraded to 64GB of RAM. I suppose you would have to replace the existing 8GB UDIMMs with 4 x 16GB sticks.
